WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday suspended eight technology companies from the Labor Department’s PERM program, the first step toward an employer-sponsored green card, CNBC reports. The eight are TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe. No end date has been announced, and the department will not process pending applications, according to NDTV. Our earlier report has the details of the announcement.
Vice President JD Vance singled out Microsoft, claiming it replaced the 6,000 workers it laid off in 2025 with people on H-1B work visas, CNBC reports. The Washington Post reports that the administration says Microsoft is under investigation for its hiring practices. Microsoft says about 80% of the roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees, according to GeekWire. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said Microsoft and Adobe were suspended because of “multiple active federal investigations”, but no investigation has produced a finding of wrongdoing against any of the eight companies, our earlier report notes.
The suspension does not cancel existing H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits, or change their holders’ status, CNBC says, but it could delay permanent residency for affected employees, The Tribune reports. India’s Ministry of External Affairs said on Friday that the suspension would not, by itself, affect existing H-1B visas or the status of holders and their dependents, and it defended Indian professionals as contributors to the US economy, according to the Tribune.
CNBC’s review of federal H-1B data shows the numbers cut both ways. All eight suspended companies rank among the top 50 H-1B sponsors, and most are IT services and consulting firms. Amazon, with 19,178 approvals in fiscal 2025, and Meta, with 6,294, were the top two sponsors, and neither was suspended. Microsoft was third with 6,258, and CNBC’s analysis found that two in three of those went to people already working there. At the same news conference, the Labor Department’s inspector general, Anthony D’Esposito, announced an investigation into alleged J-1 visa fraud involving nine major US universities, CNBC reports.
Cognizant had already been hit by an earlier suspension. On September 8, the department’s inspector general announced on X that Cognizant’s filings were suspended, without stating any allegation, NDTV reports.
The Tribune found no publicly established evidence that the suspensions were coordinated with US-India trade talks, and said the evidence points more strongly to a domestic political crackdown. Brig. (Retd) Anil Raman, a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution, writes in an NDTV opinion column that no specific charge has been made public against the four Indian firms among the eight. He argues that freezing pending applications before any finding, four weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, points to politics.
